Catholicism: the “Both and” Religion

Why do I love being Catholic and wouldn’t dream of being anything else? Because Catholicism is the “both and” religion. It’s the balance of the Catholic way of life that has preserved the Church from the pitfalls of heresies and other false teachings throughout history and makes life as a Catholic the most exciting of any.

What do I mean by the “both and” religion? I mean that the Church is one of seeming paradoxes. We proclaim that Jesus is both man and God. We say that both spirit and flesh are good. We hold that both poor and rich are beloved in the eyes of God. We performboth the ritual and the prayer. We say we need both faith and reason. We say one is redeemed by both faith and good works.

If this doesn’t strike you as odd, it should. I know of no other religion that puts two extremes beside each other without turning it into a mixture of the two, or on the other hand accepts one and ignores the other. Catholicism looks at the whole picture, it combines the two extremes, and yet allows them to be distinctly and uniquely their own. This even confuses me a little so let me use some kindergarten color knowledge to illustrate this.

This is the Catholic model

This is the heretical model, historically speaking.

This is the modern tendency when trying to reconcile extremes.

It’s much more comforting to look at the all blue or the green bridging the blue and the yellow. It’s much more unnerving to have to see the blue and the yellow side-by-side and yet fiercely remaining blue and yellow. Let’s use these models to look at Catholic thought versus other forms of thought.

On the person of Jesus:  was He human?  Was He divine? The Arian heresy held that Jesus was created by God the Father, therefore He was not of the same being and not divine in nature and so subordinate to the Father. On the other side you have the Sabellianist heresy, which said that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were just masks worn by one entity, God, so Jesus was only divine and not at all human. These both inherently say “No” to the other side of the truth about Christ. The Catholic Church says “No” to the “No” of these heresies, which is another way of saying “Yes” to the truth of Jesus’ being both fully human and fully divine. In the case of St. Nicholas he said “No” to the Arian bishop at the Council of Nicaea with his fist. (Our beloved gift-giving saint is also a total badass if you didn’t know)

On the flesh:  Is flesh good or bad? This is probably the most misunderstood part of the Catholic teaching, because Catholics tend to be mistaken for Gnostics. Essentially Gnosticism held that flesh was evil and bad and the only way to gain salvation was by knowledge and the spirit, which was good. THIS IS NOT CATHOLICISM. Catholicism holds that both spirit and flesh are good. The confusion comes when you run across something like Playboy and the Catholic Church says “No” to the explicit sexuality. Sounds a bit like Gnosticism. But go back to what we say as a Church, “both and.” Playboy (and porn and Victoria’s Secret etc. etc.) are the flip side of the Gnostics. They say “No” to the inner soul of the person and make us simply physical, external sexual beings. The Catholic Church says “No” to the “No” of the Gnostics, and says “No” to the “No” of Hugh Hefner. We are about the whole person. Yes, the spirit is good, but not to the detriment of the inherent goodness of the body. Yes, the body (ergo sex) is good, but not to the detriment of the inherent goodness of the spirit. And when you deny one, you also corrupt the inherent good of the part you’re trying to hold onto.

For the sake of not running on I will move on to the modern model. This one is a little subtler, which is why it’s so prevalent in our world. In the case of the rich and the poor:  it is unfair that the rich should have so much money and the poor don’t, we should all be equal, right? According to the model we should all be green, neither blue nor yellow. Karl Marx would certainly agree. Let the good proletariat rise up and topple the evil rich who hold power over them and issue in the new human age of equality and happiness. Except we know how that turned out in practice. Why is that? Maybe the Catholic Church has something to say about it. We believe in the inherent dignity of all people as God’s beloved children, bothrich and poor alike. Before God we are equal. And when Jesus tells us that it’s easier for the camel to pass through the eye of the needle than for a rich man to enter heaven, he means that it’s our attachment to the wealth of the world that is bad, not the wealth itself. The rich are not evil for being rich. It’s how they use their wealth. Do they greedily hoard it? Or do they freely use it to minister to those around them? A perfect example of this is Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati.

Just one more for the modern model. Ever heard the saying, “we’re all in this together.” I have. Take a quick look at the world; is that the case? No? Surprising isn’t it, to realize that someone may not share the same vision for the world as you? By the way, what is the “this” in that saying? What is the goal “we’re all in this” for? How about this one, “all the religions say the same thing and contain truth so it doesn’t matter which one you’re a part of, we all get to heaven.” I have. It’s wrong. Religions may have similar rituals and practices (like fasting in Catholicism and Buddhism) but if you get down to the core teaching, could a religion that proclaims the almighty God as the source and end of our eternal soul be so similar to one that proclaims rebirth and the non-existence of the self? But back to the heart of the issue, what’s the common denominator between these two sayings? Pantheism, the modern tendency to take blue and yellow and mix them together to make everything green. It’s much more comfortable to look at similarities between people and make a claim to universality so we can all get along in a nice relativistic world without having to make a moral effort than to acknowledge our glaring differences. But the Catholic Church says “NO” to the “No” of pantheism. We are meant both to be united to God and to remain distinctly and uniquely ourselves. He affirms our otherness while simultaneously uniting Himself to us. It’s mind-blowing. The same is true of our relations among each other here on earth. We don’t become a green when we get along; we remain fiercely and distinctly ourselves, one is blue and the other is yellow. That’s the romanticism of the Catholic way. The pantheistic modern says “No” to the reality that there are indeed people out there who are working to bring others down. If that’s “all in this together” then I think we need to reassess our understanding of “all.” The pantheistic modern says “No” to the reality that religions differ greatly from one another. The Catholic Church has her eyes wide open to the fact that we are all distinct and unique to one another, and in fact often disagree profoundly. This is the exciting prerequisite for the one thing that makes life meaningful. Love. If we are all one and there is no difference between you and me, (we are green), then I cannot love you, because I am just loving me. That’s not love, that’s narcissism. It is only when I recognize the otherness of you that I can go outside of my own little world and do something for the good of you as other, without my personal interest, that I can truly love.

So is the Catholic Church the one true Church with the one true Faith? Yes. She is, in fact, the one institution that has truly free thought, truly free love, truly free faith, truly free rationality, truly free action, truly free enlightenment, truly free romanticism, truly free joy; she is truly free. I trust in the freedom of the “both and” church that says “No” to impossibility and “Yes” to the possibility of the Truth, the balance of two distinct extremes that would seem to conflict in our human minds. She keeps her eyes open to the whole picture, whether it’s easy to accept or not. She also realizes that the whole picture is infinitely beyond us, because it is God, so we must always do more to take in more of the whole picture. The Church is more than the city on a hill, she is the city balancing at the sharp peak of a two-colored mountain, one half is blue, the other is yellow.

Written by:
Marty Arlinghaus